If you happen to (like me) use Ctrl+V for paste (mswin behaviour), and want to inseert Unicode chars, you can do so with: Ctrl+Shft+u <unicode><enter>, for example: Ctrl+Shft+u 2023<enter> ‣ (tested on Ubuntu Linux)

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If you happen to (like me) use Ctrl+V for paste (mswin behaviour), and want to insert Unicode chars, you can do so with: Ctrl+Shft+u <unicode><enter>, for example: Ctrl+Shft+u 2023<enter> ‣ (tested on Ubuntu Linux)

:How about just using the workaround mentioned at {{help|CTRL-V-alternative}}? <C-S-U> should be indistinguishable by many systems from <C-U>, and typing <C-U> in insert mode means "delete all text from my cursor to the beginning of the line", and additionally will not create a new "change" by default, so you could lose your entire insertion of text since you entered insert mode. See [[Recover from accidental Ctrl-U]], I could not think of a reason anyone would make this mistake, but now I know of one. --[[User:Fritzophrenic|Fritzophrenic]] 21:16, January 30, 2012 (UTC)

:How about just using the workaround mentioned at {{help|CTRL-V-alternative}}? <C-S-U> should be indistinguishable by many systems from <C-U>, and typing <C-U> in insert mode means "delete all text from my cursor to the beginning of the line", and additionally will not create a new "change" by default, so you could lose your entire insertion of text since you entered insert mode. See [[Recover from accidental Ctrl-U]], I could not think of a reason anyone would make this mistake, but now I know of one. --[[User:Fritzophrenic|Fritzophrenic]] 21:16, January 30, 2012 (UTC)

Well, that works too. But the <C-S-U> for one shows the numbers you've typed in so far, and two: it works in a lot more programs (again: at least in Ubuntu). (Terminal, Chrome, Gvim, ...) - PS: I have made the C-U mistake while in insert mode many a time :( luckily, I found this page recently :D

Well, that works too. But the <C-S-U> for one shows the numbers you've typed in so far, and two: it works in a lot more programs (again: at least in Ubuntu). (Terminal, Chrome, Gvim, ...) - PS: I have made the C-U mistake while in insert mode many a time :( luckily, I found this page recently :D

What the above does

has("multi_byte") checks if you have the right options compiled-in. If you haven't got what it takes, it's no use trying to use Unicode.

'termencoding' defines how your keyboard encodes what you type. Here we save the value corresponding to your locale before changing 'encoding' (see below).

'encoding' sets how vim shall represent characters internally. Utf-8 is necessary for most flavors of Unicode.

'fileencoding' sets the encoding for a particular file (local to buffer); :setglobal sets the default value. An empty value can also be used: it defaults to same as 'encoding'. Or you may want to set one of the ucs encodings, It might make the same disk file bigger or smaller depending on your particular mix of characters. Also, IIUC, utf-8 is always big-endian (high bit first) while ucs can be big-endian or little-endian, so if you use it, you will probably need to set 'bomb" (see below).

'bomb' (boolean): if set, vim will put a "byte order mark" (or BOM for short) at the start of Unicode files. This option is irrelevant for non-Unicode files (iso-8859, etc.). This BOM is the codepoint U+FEFF, which is represented on disk as follows:

UTF-8: EF BB BF

UTF-16be: FE FF

UTF-16le: FF FE

UTF-32be: 00 00 FE FF

UTF-32le: FF FE 00 00

That is, the BOM allows an easy determination of which Unicode encoding and which endianness are being used (assuming that a file in UTF-16le won't start with a NULL).

In the above example, 'set bomb' is commented out because it can cause problems if your encoding is utf-8, and is not really necessary. From the Wikipedia BOM page:

"While Unicode standard allows BOM in UTF-8, it does not require or recommend it. Byte order has no meaning in UTF-8 so a BOM only serves to identify a text stream or file as UTF-8 or that it was converted from another format that has a BOM."

The advantage of setting BOM is that Vim can very easily determine that the file is encoded in UTF-8, but is often not understood, misrepresented, or even considered invalid in other programs, such as compilers, web browsers, or text editors not as nice as Vim.

The nice thing about 'bomb' is that when Vim reads a file, and the file has a BOM already included, Vim will automatically set 'bomb' local to the buffer so that it is written out again. So as a general rule, it is probably best to set 'bomb' local to the buffer, only on the files where it is considered useful.

'fileencodings' defines the heuristic to set 'fileencoding' (local to buffer) when reading an existing file. The first one that matches will be used. Ucs-bom is "ucs with byte-order-mark"; it must not come after utf-8 if you want it to be used.

Additional remarks

In "replace" mode, one utf character (one or more data bytes) replaces one utf character (which need not use the same number of bytes).

In "normal" mode, ga shows the character under the cursor as text, decimal, octal and hex; g8 shows which byte or bytes are used to represent it.

In "insert" or "replace" mode,

any character defined on your keyboard can be entered the usual way (even with dead keys if you have them, e.g. French circumflex, German umlaut, etc.);

any character which has a "digraph" (there are a huge lot of them, see :dig after setting enc=utf-8) can be entered with a Ctrl-K prefix;

any utf character at all can be entered with a Ctrl-V prefix, either <Ctrl-V> u aaaa or <Ctrl-V> U bbbbbbbb, with 0 <= aaaa <= FFFF, or 0 <= bbbbbbbb <= 7FFFFFFF.

If you have sourced mswin.vim (which I don't recommend) then <Ctrl-V> has been remapped to the "paste" operation; in this case you need to use <Ctrl-Q> instead.

Gvim will display it properly if you have the fonts for it, provided that you set 'guifont' to some fixed-width font which has the glyphs you want to use (Courier New is OK for French, German, Greek, Russian and more, but I'm not sure about Hebrew or Arabic; its glyphs are of a more "fixed" width than those of, e.g. Lucida Console: the latter can be awkward if you need bold Cyrillic writing).

Until recently, gvim displayed any Unicode codepoint above U+FFFF as a question mark (double-width for CJK). This was fixed by patch 7.1.116 dated 2007 Sep 17 20:39. If you still have an older version, it is strongly recommended that you upgrade to the current release (and a recent patchlevel).

Related plugins

See also

Comments

If you happen to (like me) use Ctrl+V for paste (mswin behaviour), and want to insert Unicode chars, you can do so with: Ctrl+Shft+u <unicode><enter>, for example: Ctrl+Shft+u 2023<enter> ‣ (tested on Ubuntu Linux)

How about just using the workaround mentioned at :help CTRL-V-alternative? <C-S-U> should be indistinguishable by many systems from <C-U>, and typing <C-U> in insert mode means "delete all text from my cursor to the beginning of the line", and additionally will not create a new "change" by default, so you could lose your entire insertion of text since you entered insert mode. See Recover from accidental Ctrl-U, I could not think of a reason anyone would make this mistake, but now I know of one. --Fritzophrenic 21:16, January 30, 2012 (UTC)

Well, that works too. But the <C-S-U> for one shows the numbers you've typed in so far, and two: it works in a lot more programs (again: at least in Ubuntu). (Terminal, Chrome, Gvim, ...) - PS: I have made the C-U mistake while in insert mode many a time :( luckily, I found this page recently :D

On a Windows XP system I had trouble making vim enter Greek input text in Unicode files using the Hellenic keyboard layout by setting termencoding to iso8859-7. Setting it to cp1253 solved the problem.

If you, like me, are a Far East (esp. CJK) user and need symbols like the dash to be double-width, you need the option:

The combinations listed under :help digraphs-default are standard and come from RFC 1345. Other digraphs for some accented Latin letters are found at the very end of the output of the :digraph command: these are nonstandard synonyms, defined for compatibility with some legacy versions of Vim.

If you type Ctrl-K followed by a digraph which is not defined, Vim will look for the same two characters in the opposite order.

It's also possible to use Ctrl-v with unicode values, see :help i_CTRL-V_digit: <C-V>u0301 produces ́

Even in UTF-8 encoding, setting 'bomb' on or off is purely a personal preference:

Advantage: In the filetypes where a BOM is allowed (HTML, CSS, …) or treated as a zero-width no-break space (plaintext, …), it specifies unambiguously that the file is in UTF-8

Disadvantage: In some filetypes where the file could be in ASCII or in UTF-8 but not in other Unicode encodings, and in particular in any script starting with #! in its first line, the BOM won't be recognised and may cause a syntax error.

does not work for me. I expect the default file encoding to be applied to newly created files, new buffers. This does not happen. Documentation says fileencoding is buffer local, so I assume setglobal has no effect.

The setglobal fileencoding works just fine for me, and it ought to. Even though 'filencoding' is a buffer-local option, it still has a global value used to initialize the local option. This global value is what :setglobal fileencoding=latin1 for example modifies. Specifically, the following sequence will, for me, produce an initial buffer with fenc equal to an empty string, a second buffer with fenc equal to an empty string, and a third buffer with fenc equal to "latin1":